IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/jafrec/v10y2001i3p311-335..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Trade Blocs: Relevant for Africa?

Author

Listed:
  • Jan Willem Gunning

Abstract

African trade blocs are largely pursued for political reasons. The economic effects are dubious: a bloc may well reduce the welfare of its members, particularly if the rest of the world is the marginal supplier. Even if the bloc raises aggregate welfare it is likely to be problematic, leading to a divergence of income levels with the poorer members of the bloc losing. Far from promoting regional trust and cooperation the bloc can then cause tensions between the member countries. An important positive effect is improved product variety. This makes the adjustment of the production structure less painful than is commonly assumed. In Africa there has seldom been clarity on the objectives of preferential trading arrangements. This matters since many objectives (scale and competition effects, improved variety and regional cooperation on infrastructure projects) do not require the formation of a trade bloc. If a trade bloc is set up for political reasons (e.g. to improve security) then it is desirable that it unilaterally lowers external tariffs so as to reduce trade diversion and income divergence.

Suggested Citation

  • Jan Willem Gunning, 2001. "Trade Blocs: Relevant for Africa?," Journal of African Economies, Centre for the Study of African Economies, vol. 10(3), pages 311-335.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:jafrec:v:10:y:2001:i:3:p:311-335.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/jae/10.3.311
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Sylvanus Kwaku Afesorgbor & Peter A. G. Bergeijk, 2014. "Measuring Multi-Membership in Economic Integration and Its Trade Impact: A Comparative Study of ECOWAS and SADC," South African Journal of Economics, Economic Society of South Africa, vol. 82(4), pages 518-530, December.
    2. Festus Ebo Turkson, 2012. "Trade Agreements and Bilateral Trade in Sub-Saharan Africa: Estimating the Trade Effects of the EU-ACP PTA and RTAs," Discussion Papers 12/07, University of Nottingham, CREDIT.
    3. Ebo Turkson & Abena D. Oduro & Priscilla Twumasi Baffour & Peter Quartey, 2023. "Regional integration and non‐tariff barriers to Intra‐Sub‐Saharan Africa trade," The World Economy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 46(2), pages 396-414, February.
    4. Céline CARRERE, 2003. "African Regional Agreements: Their Impact on Trade With or Without Currency Unions," Working Papers 200311, CERDI.
    5. Laurent Didier, 2015. "Accord tripartite de libre-échange COMESA-SADC-CAE," Post-Print hal-03546546, HAL.
    6. Lisa Borgatti, 2011. "Economic Integration in Sub-Saharan Africa," Chapters, in: Miroslav N. Jovanović (ed.), International Handbook on the Economics of Integration, Volume I, chapter 20, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    7. Sylvanus Kwaku Afesorgbor, 2013. "Revisiting the Effectiveness of African Economic Integration. A Meta-Analytic Review and Comparative Estimation Methods," Economics Working Papers 2013-13, Department of Economics and Business Economics, Aarhus University.
    8. Afesorgbor, Sylvanus Kwaku & van Bergeijk, Peter A.G., 2011. "Multi-membership and effectiveness of regional trade agreements in Western and Southern Africa: a comparative study of ECOWAS and SADC," Proceedings of the German Development Economics Conference, Berlin 2011 1, Verein für Socialpolitik, Research Committee Development Economics.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:jafrec:v:10:y:2001:i:3:p:311-335.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/csaoxuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.